Bodies of Modernism brings a new and exciting analytical lens to modernist literature, that of critical disability studies. The book offers new readings of canonical and noncanonical writers from both sides of the Atlantic including Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Olive Moore, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, J. M. Synge, Florence Barclay, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Through readings of this wide range of texts and with chapters focusing on mobility impairments, deafness, blindness, and deformity, the study reveals both modernism’s skepticism about and dependence on fantasies of whole, “normal” bodies.

Maren Tova Linett is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University.

“A nuanced view of disability as it intertwines with modernist aesthetics. Linett concentrates on disabled protagonists but expands her study from mere character analysis to a thoroughgoing critique and understanding of modernism itself. An important contribution to the field of literary and disability studies.”
— Lennard Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago

“In a wide-ranging, lively, and convincingly argued study of an array of modernist works, Maren Linett shows how various are the attitudes towards disabled bodies but also, paradoxically, how the attitudes towards specific disabilities fall into distinct broad patterns. Anyone interested in modernism will find challenging and valuable new insights on the literature of the period in Linett’s crucial and stunning view of it through the lens of disability studies.”
— Michael Groden, University of Western Ontario

“Linett’s unflinching, sometimes mortifying exposé of writers’ and readers’ misconceptions about blindness, deafness, and locomotive difficulties, together with her intricate analyses of modernist texts, will ensure the resounding impact of this study.”
— Maud Ellmann, University of Chicago